Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION

The world population is living, working, vacationing, increasingly mixing along the coasts, and standing on the front row of the greatest, most extraordinary, plastic waste tide ever faced. Washed out on the coasts in obvious and clearly visible form, the plastic pollution display obviously seen on the beaches is only the preface of the greater story that unfolded further away in the world’s oceans, yet mostly originating from where people stand: the land.
In 2008, our global plastic consumption worldwide has been estimated at 260 million tons, and, according to a 2012 report by Global Industry Analysts, plastic consumption is to reach 297.5 million tons by 2015. Plastic is versatile, lightweight, flexible, moisture resistant, strong, and relatively inexpensive. Those are the attractive qualities that lead us, around the world, to such a voracious appetite and over-consumption of plastic goods. However, durable and very slow to degrade, plastic materials that are used in the production of so many products all, ultimately, become waste with staying power. Our tremendous attraction to plastic, coupled with an undeniable behavioral propensity of increasingly over-consuming, discarding, littering and thus polluting, has become a combination of lethal nature.
Plastic bags are in use by consumers worldwide since the 1960’s, (Mc Kinley, 2010). These bags are sometimes called single-use bags, referring to carrying items from a store to a home. Open bags with carrying handles are used in large numbers worldwide. Stores often provide them as a convenience to shoppers.
The number of plastic bags used worldwide has been estimated to be on the order of 1 trillion annually. The use of plastic bags differs dramatically across countries. While the average consumer in China uses only 2 or 3 plastic bags a year, the numbers are much higher in most other